Long-Term Neighborhood Effects on Low-Income Families: Evidence from Moving to Opportunity

By Jens Ludwig, Greg J. Duncan, L. Gennetian, Lawrence F. Katz, Ronald C. Kessler, Jeffrey R. Kling, L. Sanbonmatsu. 2013

444 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine long-term neighborhood effects on low-income families using data from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) randomized housing-mobility experiment, which offered some public-housing families but not others the chance to move to less-disadvantaged neighborhoods. We show that 10-15 years after baseline MTO improves adult physical and mental health; has no detectable effect on economic outcomes, youth schooling and youth physical health; and mixed results by gender on other youth outcomes, with girls doing better on some measures and boys doing worse. Despite the somewhat mixed pattern of impacts on traditional behavioral outcomes, MTO moves substantially improve adult subjective well-being.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5f9bcac83f6c41990988e4a7310a7b4700392045

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Citations in the corpus

Testing the School‐to‐Prison Pipeline (2017, background): “…have adverse effects on the educational attainment and future job prospects of young people growing up in those neighborhoods (Katz & Turner, 2008; Ludwig et al., 2013; Sharkey et al., 2014).1 Inside school walls, bullying and aggressive behavior can have long-lasting psychological effects on…”
Causal Inference in Urban and Regional Economics (2014, unknown): “The authors deal with the dynamic nature of bond referenda by developing two estimators of ITT and TT.”
Isolated by Caste: Neighbourhood-Scale Residential Segregation in Indian Metros (2018, background): “(2013) prove that moving to a better neighborhood had a positive impact on the physical and mental health of the disadvantageous households. Putnam (2007) in fact counters his own theory by arguing that the negative effects of diversity are just temporary, and the positive aspects of diversity will ”
Neighborhood Income Composition by Household Race and Income, 1990–2009 (2015, background): “Studies of the moving to Opportunity program found little effect of neighborhood poverty levels on many child and family outcomes (Ludwig et al. 2013).”
Field experiments across the social sciences (2017, background): “In 1982, the American Journal of Sociology hosted a debate on the analysis and interpretation of experimental data (Rossi et al. 1982, Zeisel 1982) that foreshadowed the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) debate decades later (Clampet-Lundquist & Massey 2008, Ludwig et al. 2008, Sampson 2008).”
The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility I: Childhood Exposure Effects (2018, background): “We contribute to this literature by presenting quasi-experimental estimates of exposure effects, addressing the concerns about selection and omitted variable bias that arise in observational studies (Ludwig et al. 2008). Although we find evidence of childhood exposure effects that are qualitatively ”
THE PERSISTENCE OF POVERTY IN THE CONTEXT OF FINANCIAL INSTABILITY: A BEHAVIORAL PERSPECTIVE (2015, background): “Neighborhoods are dangerous, health care is not always available, and close friends and relatives often need help (Edin & Kissane, 2010; Gennetian et al., 2015; Halpern-Meekin et al., 2015; Ludwig et al., 2013).”
Residential Segregation by Income , 1970-2009 (2013, background): “…of low-income families were offered housing vouchers to encourage them move to low-poverty neighborhoods, show few significant or long-term impacts of reduced exposure to neighborhood poverty (Kling, Liebman, and Katz 2007; Ludwig, Duncan, Gennetian, Katz, Kessler, Kling, and Sanbonmatsu 2013).”